Review: 'Conart Confidential'

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 15, 2010

Conart Confidential: The Great Contemporary Art Bubble

Documentary. Written and directed by Ben Lewis (Not rated. 95 minutes. At the Roxie, San Francisco.)

Anyone familiar with this equation - the market value of an artwork equals whatever someone can be persuaded to pay for it - need not see "Con-art Confidential."

British art journalist Ben Lewis spent more than a year tracking the international market in high-fashion contemporary art as it appeared - for a time - to defy the implosion of other assets that happened all around it in 2008.

An audience that did not watch the art bubble inflate will no doubt share Lewis' shock at some of the auction records: $95 million for a Picasso, $86 million for a Francis Bacon triptych, $73 million for a Rothko.

Does art get that good?

No, because price is not a measure of artistic value but of desirability stimulated by other means: by fashion, competitiveness, a casino mentality and shenanigans permitted by an unregulated market.

Lewis delves not deeply but at length into these factors. And he seems just too gleefully intent on embarrassing the high rollers who agreed to speak with him on camera before the bubble burst. To observers who do not share their class position, they embarrass themselves from the start by their arrogant certainty of being able to inflate cash values by extravagant speculation.

The most credible commentator who spoke with Lewis is James Chanos, a hedge fund manager who foresaw the bursting of the bubble when auction houses "stopped being agents and became principals" - that is, they started lending money to qualified bidders to boost their own bottom line.

Lewis gives a grinning account of various - now obvious - false assumptions and true chicanery that led the contemporary art market to crash. But his film would have benefited by some account, just one, of why - speculative fantasies aside - people do care about art.

The art market, even at auction, has begun a guarded recovery. But Lewis' film has gained a timeliness he could never have planned thanks to the appointment this week of Jeffrey Deitch - a razzle-dazzle art dealer who appears in the film - as the new director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

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